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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

A comic strip that follows the adventures of Barry McKenzie, a dinky-di but innocent 'ocker' who resides in the London suburb of Earl's Court with his fellow Australian mates. Their lives are filled with much beer drinking, insulting (and being insulted by) pompous Brits, and the pursuit (largely unsuccessful) of women. Barry Humphries's dialogue, 'rich' in colloquial speech, celebrates all manner of grotesque behaviour and attitudes.

Adaptations

After he comes into a small inheritance, Barry McKenzie (aka Bazza) decides to visit England with his aunt, which leads to many humerus and some not-so-humorous incidents with Poms from all persuasions and classes. As Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper note: 'The narrative offers a 'vigorous parody of the Australian "ocker," anti-intellectual, xenophobic, obsessed with beer and sex but never capable of relating positively with women, using a vernacular of prodigious vulgarity and inventiveness, and totally oblivious of anything beyond his own narrow conception of the order of things' (1980, p. 340).

Notes

In 1964, Nicholas Garland and a friend devised a strip about 'Alan Merryweather', a strong-jawed northerner who came to London. Although the strip was accepted for Private Eye magazine by editor Richard Ingrams, comedian Peter Cook (one of the magazine's financial backers) thought the central character should be changed to an Australian, with the theme of the strip being an 'innocent abroad.' Cook suggested Barry Humphries as the writer and subsequently introduced him to Garland. Interestingly, Humphries had previously made a 'gramophone record that included the plaintive monologue of an Earl's Court Australian who huddled together with his mates in an Anglophobic ghetto, drinking Foster's lager' (More Please, p.228).

The strip was re-named 'Barry McKenzie' (a combination of Humphries' Christian name and Australian fast bowler Graham McKenzie's surname). Garland recalls, however, that 'McKenzie's chin was taken from "Desperate Dan," and his double-breasted suit, striped tie and wide-brimmed hat were inspired by a group of middle-aged Anzacs [he] once saw marching down Whitehall during a Remembrance Day parade.' According to Humphries, the 'Barry McKenzie' strip was met with 'stunned indifference' when first published in Private Eye, but over the next few months he and Garland, along with Ingrams, nursed the strip along. 'The drawings became surer and my balloons bigger,' writes Humphries. 'Our hero had started soliloquizing rather in the manner of one of my long-winded stage characters... 'Bazza' spoke [however] in an invented idiom; a synthetic Australian compounded of schoolboy, [National] Service, old-fashioned proletarian and even made-up slang' (More Please, p.231).

Regarding their collaboration, Garland also recalls that 'in all the time we worked together we rarely spent very long deciding on the direction a new episode might take. Barry would introduce a new character or situation without necessarily knowing how the story would develop. He was more interested in setting up a joke or making an opportunity for himself to jeer at some element of English life that he found particularly repellent or fatuous.' Garland has also confessed that he 'usually drew in a tearing hurry,' as he and Humphries were paid only £15 per episode between the two of them and he 'could not [therefore] afford to spend too much time on the strip.'

Although Garland joined the Daily Telegraph as the paper's first political cartoonist in 1966, drew a weekly political cartoon for the New Statesman from 1971 to 1976, and contributed to the Spectator, he and Humphries continued to produce the 'Barry Mackenzie' comics for Private Eye until 1974. The series ended after a disagreement with the editor Richard Ingrams concerning the episode drawn for 8 March 1974, which according to one contemporary report included 'rather explicit lesbianism.' Although amendments were made, the series was subsequently cancelled, with Garland claiming that Ingrams had become bored with the strip.

In his autobiography, More Please (1992), Barry Humphries writes, 'The comic strip ran, with a few interruptions, almost until the end of the decade and spanned that period of the sixties to which the Press attached the epithet "swinging"' (p.231). This conflicts with Kent University's British Cartoon Archive, which records that the comic strip ceased either with the 8 March 1974 issue of Private Eye or the preceeding issue.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Private Eye is a fortnightly British satirical and current affairs magazine which since 1961 has poked fun at the British establishment and any public figures deemed incompetent, inefficient or corrupt. The magazine has, however, also drawn much criticism from other media outlets and the public at times for both its style and its willingness to print defamatory and controversial stories. Private Eye's long-term popularity and socio-political significance has seen many jokes and miscellanea from its pages enter British popular culture. It also remains one of the UK's best-selling current affairs magazines.

A forerunner to Private Eye was The Salopian, a school magazine edited by Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton, Christopher Booker and Paul Foot at Shrewsbury School in the mid-1950s. While studying at Oxford University Ingrams and Foot met Peter Usborne (who initially funded the magazine), Andrew Osmond, John Wells and Danae Brook, who also played a part in the magazine's early development. The first editor was Christopher Booker. Willie Rushton both designed its look and contributed cartoons. These early editions were essentially an extension of the original school magazine, and an alternative to Punch, comprising silly jokes and school-boy humour. Eventually, however, the magazine got caught up in the rage for satire and began to build into a small but increasingly successful amateur publication. Within a few years more funding was provided by Nicholas Luard and Peter Cook (who also ran The Establishment, a satirical nightclub) and Private Eye became fully professional. Other key people associated with the magazine during the early years were Auberon Waugh, Claud Cockburn, Barry Fantoni, Gerald Scarfe, Tony Rushton, Patrick Marnham, Candida Betjeman, Christopher Logue (who provided a "True Stories" column, featuring cuttings from the national press) and gossip columnist Nigel Dempster (who wrote extensively for the magazine before he fell out with the editor and other writers). Paul Foot also wrote on politics, local government and corruption.

One of Public Eye's early long-running features was the Australian-inspired 'Barry McKenzie' comic series (written by Barry Humphries and illustrated by Nicholas Garland). It ran between 1964 and 1974.